NB : This paper was published in
the Journal of the Institute of Asian Studies, Vol. XIV, N°1 (Chennai,
India), September 1996, pp. 15-38. It was first given as a paper at the 5th
Sri Lanka Conference held at the University of New Hampshire in August
13-15, 1995.

« Ceylon, from the standpoint of ethnology and culture, is an
integral part of India. [...] It should be noted that the distinctively
Sinhalese (Buddhist) art is the Kandyan art of the interior: the art of Jaffna
belongs to that of Southern India, while that of the low country during the
last three centuries has been one-third European. »[COOMARASWAMY 1913: v, 39]

AKC
- the acronym by which Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy is universally known - was
born to a Ceylonese Hindu Tamil father and an English Catholic mother in
Colombo on 22nd August 1877. His mother left with him for England when he was
only two, and his father, Sir Mutu Coomaraswamy, a barrister and legislative
council member, unexpectedly passed away on the eve of joining his son in
England on 4 May 1879. AKC lived in symbiosis with his mother, aunt and
grandmother, the only remaining members of a wealthy aristocratic English
family in Kent, until he graduated from University College, London, with first
class honours in minerology and botany in 1900, and then he left for Ceylon. By
1903, he was fellow of University College, and his research into minerology
earned him an enduring place in the colony, in the same year, as the first
director of the Minerological Survey of Ceylon. In 1906, the University of
London conferred on AKC the degree of D.Sc. for his official reports on
Ceylonese minerology and other scientific papers, an honour never previously
bestowed on a Ceylonese: AKC had also incidentally discovered a new mineral - thorianite, an oxide of thorium and
uranium. While in Ceylon, he had also founded The Ceylon Social Reform Society,
1905-1907, « in order to encourage and initiate reform in social customs
amongst the Ceylonese, and to discourage the thoughtless imitation of
unsuitable European habits and customs ». [LIPSEY III 1977: 22] In 1907,
he left his birthplace for good, having been frustrated in his efforts to
instill a sense of appreciative preservation for time-honoured indigenous arts
andcrafts in the island. In 1908, he
had brought out on his own Essex House Press [using William Morris’s famous
handpress, The Kelmscott Press, while
taking fifteen months to print 425 copies] in Broad Campden, near
Stratford-upon-Avon, his first considerable work as an art historian: Mediaeval
Sinhalese Art, which dealt with the later traditional arts of Ceylon, not
those of Anuradhapura or Polannaruva before the twelfth/thirteenth centuries.

From that date on, AKC veered almost completely away from Ceylonese
minerology and arts, and devoted the remaining forty years of his life almost
entirely to « discovering » and interpreting Indian arts, philosophy
and religion. Roger Lipsey, AKC’s meticulous biographer, comments:

Coomaraswamy’s writings in the Ceylon period show
that he was touched

by the formal religious art and architecture of the
island and learned much

from seeing that a religious conception of life
suffused the life and artifacts

of the common people of Ceylon, but he seems to have
had little significant

contact with the monastic community. [...]

... he included Ceylon as an integral part of his
earliest general history

of Indian art [...] but in fact his departure had
something final in it. Ceylon

had not been ready to
respond to his ideas, not ready to create and support

a « Mistral ». [Frédéric Mistral, a
French poet, attempted to revive the

« literature and customs of the pays de la langue d’oc » in France
in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an effort
which « represented for

Coomaraswamy the unachieved ideal he had dreamed
for Ceylon ».]

[LIPSEY III 1977: 32-40]

Elsewhere in the biography Lipsey himself draws revealing attention to
the fact that AKC’s ideas were not
really his own: he had been dourly and profoundly influenced during his English
boyhood days by John Ruskin and William Morris’s anti-industrialist,
back-to-nature writings and activities. So, in a way, it would seem that AKC’s
failure to inculcate Morris’s ideals in Ceylon drove him to tag the island to
the Indian sub-continent, and when he was finally harassed by the British
authorities during the First World War for his open support of the Indian
independence movement (swadeshi or
the boycotting of British imports and the development of village handicrafts)
and his refusal to take up arms, refusing even conscription as a conscientious
objector in a special detachment, his British passport (and some of his
inherited fortune) was officially confiscated,2 and one might say, in the same
breath, that his ties with Ceylon had almost come loose, though not in the
hearts of Ceylonese whose elite gathered in large numbers in Colombo to
celebrate his seventieth birthday festschrift
party held in Boston where he was since 1917 the curator (and later fellow) of
Indian and Muhammedan art at the Museum of Fine Arts. It is curious that he did
not feel the same way about India. His attempts to find a place in the sun at
that moment in India, too, were thwarted: he was refused a teaching post at
Benares and, elsewhere, as a founding « curator ». Irony of ironies,
AKC was made the Chairman of the National Committee for India’s Freedom - in absentia - in 1938.

In spite of - or rather because of - these life-shakingly traumatic
events, AKC clung closely to his origins, and, in 1907 at Lahore, formally
became a staunchly-informed Hindu, even, later, going to the extent of wanting
to embrace sanyasi-hood: he had
decided to settle for good in India after his retirement from the Boston Museum
with his fourth wife of Jewish origin from Argentina. His encyclopaedic
knowledge of things cultural from India (and Ceylon, of course), his
penetrating insights into European and Oriental art, thought, aesthetics and
religion, meticulously analysed and interpreted in hundreds of articles and
essays, catalogues and reviews, his indefatigable defence and/or discovery of
the Indian sub-continent’s cultural past, such as, Rajput painting, and Indian
cultural influence and spread in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia - make him the
quintessential son of South Asia, a role that devolves on him to greater effect
than with most of the Indian and Ceylonese intellectuals of the first half of
this century.

It is precisely for these reasons that we may think
of him as a Ceylonese, not just because he had been born in Colombo, the son of
an eminent Tamil leader, nor because his cousins [this is not certain], Sir
Ponnambalam Arunachalam and Ponnambalam Ramanathan, and his nephew [AKC’s son,
Dr.Rama P., made it known to the writer, in 1995, that Tambimuttu was in no way
related to AKC] Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu, had each attained fame as
native-born Ceylonese.

Coomaraswamy’s Espousal of the Hindu Philosophy of
Art

Let us next consider if there is a form of aesthetics
unique to AKC, or even if there were an attitude to art or a critical vision of
things that might be construed as a particular « aesthetic » way of
looking at the things of beauty or objets
d’art that AKC wrote about so extensively. In other words, what - if any -
is his philosophy of art? But before we do so, we may as well quote what he had
to say generally about his life’s work and the underlying truth about things,
practically at the end of his life, that is, at his seventieth birthday party.

[...] I should like to emphasize that I have never
built up a philosophy

of my own or wished to establish a new school of
thought. Perhaps the

greatest thing I have learned is never to think for
myself; I fully agree

with André Gide that « toutes choses sont
dites déjà »[sic], and what I have

sought is to understand what has been said, while
taking no account of

the « inferior philosophers ». Holding
with Heracleitus that the Word is

common to all, and that Wisdom is to know the Will
whereby all things

are steered, I am convinced with Jeremias that the
human cultures in all

their apparent diversity are but the dialects of
one and the same language

of the spirit, that there is a « common
universe of discourse » transcending

the differences of tongues.[LIPSEY II
1977: 434]

Even if we grant that AKC may be allowed some excesses of style and
language at the end of a long and arduous day, there is in this quotation one
sentence that is pertinent to the consideration of « his » aesthetics,
and which is « ...what I have sought is to understand what has been
said... ». We need not occupy ourselves with his other declarations in the
above final avowal. As far as his « aesthetics » are concerned, this
statement is quite crucial. In fact, any reader of his copious works on art on
the lookout for a personal, special theory or attitude towards art is bound to
be either disappointed or confused. This might just be the conclusive point. He
was so involved with the traditional way of looking at things that, one might say,
he simply forgot to work out for himself his own philosophy of art,
until...until one takes note of his stray comments in letters, catalogue
write-ups and « asides », especially on modern art. There is one
direct avowal, however, that we should take into consideration, but in view of
the rest of the « ambiguous » statements vis-à-vis what he espouses
in traditional Hindu or Buddhist theories, we might be well-advised to view it
with some (legitimate) circumspection. Before he discourses on the
« true » Scholastic philosophy of art which he postulates as
representing equally that of the Orient, he declares, as late as 1939:

It will not be out of place to say that I believe what
I have to expound;

for the study of any subject can live only to the
extent that the student

himself stands or falls by the life of the subject
studied; the interdependence

of faith and understanding applying as much to the
theory of art as to

any other doctrine. [So much so that we can do no
better than to quote AKC

resuming the traditional philosophy of art.] We have
emphasized that art

is for the man, and not the man for the art: that
whatever is made only to

give pleasure is a luxury and that the love of art
under these conditions

becomes a mortal sin; that in traditional art function
and meaning are

inseparable goods; that it holds in both respects that
there can be no good

use without art; and that all good uses involve the
corresponding pleasures.

We have shown that the traditional artist
[« normally anonymous »] is not

expressing himself, but a thesis: [...] We have shown
that art is essentially

symbolic, and only accidentally illustrative or
historical; and finally that

art, even the highest, is only the means to an
end...

[COOMARASWAMY 1943/1956: 23]

In several erudite articles, especially in the second-half of his life,
such as, « The Part of Art in Indian Life », « A Figure of
Speech or a Figure of Thought », « The Intellectual Operation in
Indian Art », « Samvega: Aesthetic
Shock », not to mention the relevant essays in The Dance of Siva:
Essays on Indian Art and Culture, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of
Art, and The Transformation of Nature in Art, AKC took great pains
to analyse and explain both the European and Oriental traditional philosophy of
art, a task, it would seem, which had in the process convinced him of the
perennial value of the traditional point of view since the works of art as in
the case of the Indian sub-continent and its environs appeared to him to endure
and increase in value down through the ages. This approach in itself would be
sufficient to characterise AKC’s espousal of the traditional methods of
fashioning and appreciating art, but there is yet another aspect of his makeup
which needs to be circumscribed and which is also evident in the above
quotation: he was a devout believer! His unprotesting acceptance of Hinduism as
a creed did not in any way detract from his early Catholic upbringing. It must
be noted here that his researches into the arts went hand in glove with his
reading and exposition of religion and metaphysics. In the last phase of his
life, from 1932 to 1947, religion as a source of the fundamental nature of art
informed his own personal view of life, and the more he attempted the exegeses
of individual pieces of art, the more he saw the unity of all art informed by
the « Eternal or Universal Spirit » and the « oneness » of
man.

Even as early as 1918 when he fell in love with the seventeen year-old
dancer, Stella Bloch, whom he later married, he strove to share with her the
platonic love of sahaja - he
continued to live in Boston while she remained in New York, meeting
occasionally and in the summer in Maine - according to the dictates of the
« soul-lifting » Brahmanical version of carnal love.

In India we could not escape the conviction that sexual love has a deep
and

spiritual significance. There is nothing with which we can better
compare

the ‘mystic union’ of the finite with its infinite ambient - that one
experience

which proves itself and is
the only ground of faith - than the self-oblivion of

earthly lovers locked in each other’s arms, where ‘each is both.’ [...]
The least

intrusion of the ego, however, involves a return to the illusion of
duality. [...]

In sahaja, the adoration of young and beautiful girls was made the path
of

spiritual evolution and ultimate emancipation.

[COOMARASWAMY 1924/1985: 103-104]

The fact that the couple later divorced and both parties went on to
remarry and have children and prosper has little to do with our assessment of
AKC’s aesthetics, and, this,despite
the « grave doubts » shed on his probity by his disciple and close
friend, Eric Schroeder.

[...] And indeed I began to notice inconsistencies in him as a character

which for a while interrupted the growth of trust, though it never
affected

liking. [...] His marital career was inappropriate to a man who wrote of

marriage as a sacrament and some of his financial dealings seemed no
less

incongruous with the views of right livelihood which he expounded. And

yet he had spent practically all his substance for what I could see to
be a

consecrated end, the publication of his work. And he had had, by worldly

thought better of my friend than I did. It began to appear that I had
been

wrong in paying attention to my instructor’s inconsistencies...

[LIPSEY III 1977: 286-287]

There was, it appears, a
constant battle going on in AKC’s psyche. Like all men of rigour and purpose,
he sometimes faltered in the aims he set himself, but the directions his line
of thinking and experiencing took did not vary much - judging by the information
from Roger Lipsey’s biography - from that of a single-minded Western-trained
scientist attempting to come to terms with himself and his sense of
« Indian-hood ». The back-to-nature, anti-materialist advocacy of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the noble savage), William Blake (freedom and creativity
and the primacy of the Imagination), John Ruskin (« industry without art
is brutality »), William Morris (anti-industrialist social idealism and
the popular peasant culture of craft production), the reaffirming of oriental
spiritual values by Jacques Maritain and René Guénon, [y compris Emile Mâle’s Christian iconographic interpretations] and
Christian mediaeval thought as articulated by St. Augustine were the roads he
readily took to arrive at the source of traditional Hindu/Indian heritage, and
once he sensed the general direction of his course, he spared no efforts to get
the most out of it. He never really belonged to the academic world; the reason
for this perhaps may be found in his not obtaining even a single diploma in
art, aesthetics or metaphysics. Yet he was sought after eagerly by academics,
and he lectured in academe from time to time without being a tenured professor.
From the available evidence, it does appear that he taught himself everything -
from languages like Sanskrit and Pali [he steadfastly improved on the Greek and
Latin he must have learned at Wycliffe College from the age of twelve to
twenty] to the corpora of art, philosophy and religion in these languages, the
study of theology taking precedence over everything else and informing his
perceptions into the arts as the years gained on him.

AKC had thus come to the conclusion that « art in India »
meant something different from the sense we entertain of it either in our days
or probably elsewhere in the world. Art is an expression of the consummate
racial expression; no novelty in expression is wilfully sought by the artist
who acquires his skill in « pupillary succession ». Art arises in
India in response to a demand, and the « virtue or defect of a work [are
those] of the race in that age.[...] all are equally expressive:[...] there are
no distinctions of fine and appliedor
decorative art and no unsurmountable barrier dividing the arts of the folk from
the canonical arts. » [COOMARASWAMY 1923: v-viii]He believed that great art was produced by a
people who loved life, not through a dedication of art for art’s sake, a safety
valve which preserved Indian art from the corrosion of archaism. It must be
remembered, therefore, that, here, we are confronted by an aesthetician who had
definitely turned his face away from all forms of modernism and adopted for his
philosophy of art that which he conceived as being traditionally Indian or
Hindu.

Originality and novelty [in Indian art] are never intentional. Changes
in

form, distinguishing the art of one age from that of another, reflect
the

necessities of current theology, and not the invention of genius:
changes

in quality reflect the varying, but not deliberately varied, changes in,
racial

psychology, vitality, and taste. What is new arises constantly in Indian
tradition

without purpose or calculation on the part of the craftsman, simply
because

life has remained over long extended periods an ][ immediate experience.

[COOMARASWAMY 1923: vi-vii]

He believed that an artist expressing only his own ideals and
aspirations was not working originally; that only by conforming to given ideas
of the Spirit and by making it his own can the artist attain to the status of
the Greek daimon: the individual, modern « genius » in relation to
the immanent Spirit of traditional philosophy « is relatively nil »
[COOMARASWAMY 1943/1956: 38] AKC’s study and exposition of Indian art led him
gradually to an enunciation of a philosophy of art which might be construed as
his « own » adaptation of the Vedanta viewpoint.

The Hindus have never believed in art for art’s sake; their art, like
that of

mediaeval Europe, was an art for love’s sake. They made no distinctions
of

sacred and profane. [...] For great art results from the impulse to
express

certain clear intuitions of life and death, rather than from the
conscious wish

to make beautiful pictures or songs. [...] There are tests more
universal than

those of particular canons or personal likes and dislikes. A great art
expresses

a clear and impassioned vision
of life: each unessential statement detracts from

its power. [...] In Indian philosophy: « Whether or not the work
reveals the Self

(atman) within the form (rupa)...[the] presence of this spirit is
Beauty. » [...]

To cultivate some-sightedness, to recognise one reality behind the
pleasant and

unpleasant Names and Forms, the familiar and unfamiliar formulas, it is
needful

to go behind the merely representative element to the purely emotional
content

of art, its dealings with love and death, for these are exactly the same
to all

in all nations and times all over the earth. [...] It is this content,
the movement of

the spirit, that is the universal subject-matter of art.

[COOMARASWAMY 1913: vii, 56, 58]

At the root of these assumptions on the part of AKC lies perhaps a
notion that we can, with certainty, at the end of several millenia prove what
went on in the minds of artists and craftsmen in times gone by. In this respect
even intuitive feeling and/or available literary, historical or archaeological
evidence must take second place to the usefulness of a rigorous poïetical examination and verification.
It is nonetheless strange that certain Indianists seem to think that the Natya
Sastra or the Silpa Sastra or even the Tolkappiam, 3rd C.
B.C. to 2nd C. A.D. (?) - the Tamil classical treatise on poetics and
linguistics, dictating the Cangam
poetical conventions - simply came into being with a wave of the authors’s
styluses. This is particularly surprising when we see that AKC himself was well
aware of this fact.

In the same way the law books, particularly Manu, and the technical

literature, such as the Bharataya Natya Sastra, imply development
long

preceding the final recensions. And in just the same way the appearance

of Hindu sculpture and architecture in the Kusan and early Gupta period,

even in the absence of all other evidence, would prove a lengthy
previous

development.

[COOMARASWAMY 1923: 30]

These authoritative works prescribe highly coded, complex prescriptive
techniques for the arts, whether in dance, drama, music or poetry, and these
treatises, it is evident, could not have been formulated with such precision
and authority without centuries of experimentation, and acceptation by common
consensus, by all sorts of creators and patrons of the arts prior to the very
act of committing to memory or of recording these almost inflexible creative
rules on palm leaf manuscripts. The Indian arts could not have therefore
assumed its complex, refined and sophisticated forms and techniqueswithout the freedom of expression and
experimentation lasting for entire periods/generations of creative activity. To
think that tradition informs and orders its own fixed constitution without the
willful inventive intervention of « genius », as AKC does, is an
« affirmation » that must be called into question.

Indian aesthetics which has its origins in the theory of rasa as expounded by Bharata in his Natya
Sastra of the first century A.D. is grounded in the long arduous road of
the Brahmanical spiritual quest for moksa,
the liberation of the egotistical self through union with the atman, the Godhead. So, it comes down to
us in its highly coded structure through the ages with slight modifications,
and/or additional breath, to its original spiritual conception. Thus, art to an
Indian is not a separate or separable artistic activity , except for the
adherents of the Sankya school who subscribed to the belief in art for art’s
sake.

Oriental art cannot be isolated from life and studied in vacuo; [...]

...the forms of Oriental art will always seem to us arbitrary or at the

least exotic or curious, and this will be the measure of our misunder-

standing, for it was none of these things in the eyes of those for whom

it was made and who knew how to use it.

[COOMARASWAMY I 1977: 146]

It is undertaken by the devout in celebration of his/her utter
submission to the « Universal Spirit » while the receptor is likewise
expected to be sa-hrdaya, that is, of
a similar heart. Some exceptions apart, like the village practical arts of
weaving, handicrafts or orfèvrerie,
almost all the traditional fine arts and public architecture of Hindu and
Buddhist India have been religion-oriented. And yet the entire masses are
expected to partake of the results of individual or collective artistic
activity. Not just the mind and body are involved in making art what it is to
the senses, but without the « Eternal Spirit » informing it, art is
deprived of its purpose: it is just a shell, a casing without being. Art that
imitates nature is a lesser art. Conversely, Nature being not always perfect,
in other words, not always and everywhere « beautiful », there is
need for art but of an « angelic » prototypical kind.

Man’s works of art [...] are properly deduced [sic]
only when they are

made in imitation (anukrti) of the angelic arts (devasilpani).
It follows,

indeed, directly from the principle « As above,
so below » (amusya lokasyayam

loko ‘nurupah) that works of art (silpa
karmani) can only be regarded

as conceived in accordance with the law of heaven (rtaprajatani) and as

well and truely made (sukrtani, as the works of the Rbhus [Ribhus, artisan

elves, sons of Indra and Saranyu] are said to be, and
as before defined,

« beautiful ») when they are made after (anu) the angelic prototypes, which

are intellectually begotten in the revolution (pravartana) of the Year

(samvatsava,
Prajapati); ...

[COOMARASWAMY
I 1977: 81-82]

In fairness to AKC, despite the seeming identification of his own views
with traditional Indian aesthetic theories and hence the religious bias in
evaluating and judging works of art, he expresses some possible doubt or
misgiving about the contents of the essay, « The Part of Art in Indian
Life » when he says in the same breath in a footnote:

In expounding the theories of art and beauty we
have refrained from

the expression of any opinions (dristi) or hypotheses (kalpana) of our

own; relying only upon authority (sruti and smrti, Veda and Upaveda),

we speak of our exposition as authoritative (prameya)

[LIPSEY I 1977: 94 & footnote 85]

But then this footnote statement may only be another way of saying that
he felt that his own comments or opinions alongside the exposition of classical
Brahmanical theory mightbe
superfluous, what with it being religiously ordained prameya. In a short essay, however, it would be begging the task to
want to lay out in full the enormous armature of Indian classical theories of
aesthetics, a task which has nonetheless taken hundreds of pages even for AKC
to exploit and expose. We will therefore content ourselves with a shorter
statement of the theory of rasa and
its adjuncts, before coming to grips with the way AKC tackled his self-allotted
industry of interpreting Indian arts. One question however interposes itself:
Did he interpret Indian aesthetic theory as a separate branch of study for his
or the reader’s information while he left the interpretation ofthe corresponding arts to his own sense of
innate aesthetic « justness »? We will see as we go on that this is
not entirely an easy problem to unravel, since AKC has been inordinately
prolific in both the theoretically analytical and interpretative fields. In
such a situation, we are obliged to take some specific examples of both and
verify if they coincide or remain separate, that is, that he may or may not
have espoused the theory to explicate the very works of art that were born of
the theory in India.

The Rasa Theory in Coomaraswamy’s Art Historical

Interpretation

To begin with, then, what is rasa
? Apart from its denotations, according to B.N.Goswamy, first, the sense of the material essence or juice of vegetables; second, its non-material essence, the
finest part of it like the indescribable perfume that arises from it; third, rasa suggests the taste, the odour which results from its
utilisation or reception of either its material object or its non-material
properties which afford pleasure, and then its final sense in an artistic and aesthetic context:

In his essay, « Hindu View of Art II: Theory of Beauty »,
Coomaraswamy gives in some succinct detail the anatomy of rasa. He equates the term with the feeling of beauty or aesthetic
emotion, and the work of art that embodies it is deemed to be invested with one
of the nine permanent moods (sthayibhava)
which « form a master-motif to which all other expressions of emotion are
subordinate » [COOMARASWAMY 1924/1985: 31] the nine as opposed to the
thirty-three transient moods (vyabhichari
bhava).According to B.N.Goswamy
[1986: 328-329](since Coomaraswamy
lists nine but gives only eight rasa;
Bharata himself only gave eight), the rasa
constitute major sentiments as follows: the erotic (shringara), the comic (hasya),
the pathetic (karuna), the furious (raudra), the heroic (vira), the fearful or terrible (bhayanaka), the odious (bibhatsa), the wondrous (adbhuta) and the peaceful (shanta), whose bhava or état d’espirit are,
respectively: rati, hasa, shoka, krodha, utsaha, bhaya, jugupsa, vismaya, and shama. Despite AKC’s habitual academic rigour, here in an important
philosophic distinction of Indian aesthetics, he lapses by not giving or making
the distinction between rasa
(sentiment or flavour) and bhava
(emotion, état d’esprit or moods)
though he makes up for it all by adjusting and recapitulating the theory amply
- a favourite practice of his in successive essays since they very often treat
of the same subject matter - in his « The theory of Art in Asia ». In
the former essay, however, he later compensates by the subtle distinctions he
proposes on the nature of rasa, though
the nuances seem, to me, a product of interpretative accretions.

for the sake of coherence.] If, on the contrary, a
transient emotion is

made the motif of the whole work, this
« extended development

of a transient emotion tends to the absence of
rasa, » [from Dhanamjaya’s

Dasarupa, iv, 45] or as we should now say,
the work becomes

sentimental. Pretty art which emphasizes passing
feelings and

personal emotion is neither beautiful nor true:
[...] The tasting of

rasa - the vision of beauty - is enjoyed, says
Visvanatha [in Sahitya

Darpana, circa 1450
A.D.] « only by those who are competent thereto »:

[and he quotes Dharmadatta to the effect that]
« those devoid of

imagination, in the theatre, are but as the
wood-work, the walls, and

the stones. » [...]

[COOMARASWAMY 1924/1985: 32-33]

In other words, the Indian aesthetic embodies also a
socio-anthropologically distinctive ethical tinge to it: if you are not sa-hrdaya, that is, if you are not cast
in the same mould as the creator of the object of art, you are not worthy of
being an appreciator of the created piece. You belong in another - and I
imagine - lower caste of beings
forever blocked out of the realm of artistic appreciation. If the creator and
the receptor must be of the same trempe in
order to be able to get a glimpse of the « Ultimate Reality » which
constitutes the essence and the ultimate aim for the production of Hindu art,
then where is the necessity to provide for people of similar vision and makeup
works of art? The sa-hrdaya receptor
may just as well turn on his inner eye by virtue of his own potentially similar
artistic imagination (pratibha) to
envision the « Ultimate Reality ». The contrary being the case, the
advantages of birthright make the essential Hindu philosophic position of man vis-à-vis the « Four Ends of
Life », the purusharthas, that
is, just action (dharma), pleasure (kama), wealth (artha) and spiritual liberation (moksha), quite untenable, for it a priori arbitrarily closes one door, the door of the realisation
of moksa through art by the uplifting
experience of rasa for those who are
not endowed, by birth, with this special faculty. This Hindu attitude to art
becomes a dictum in the words of a mediaeval authority.

Viswanatha comments very pertinently on this fact
[Is AKC endorsing

this fact?] when he says that « even some
of the most eager students

of poetry are seen not to have a right
perception of rasa. » The capacity

and genius necessary for appreciation are partly
native (‘ancient’) and

partly cultivated (‘contemporary’): but
cultivation alone is useless,

and if the poet is born, so too is the rasika
[in AKC’s words « one who

enjoys rasa,
a connoisseur or lover »], and criticism is akin to genius.

[COOMARASWAMY
1924/1985: 33]

Bharata’s dictum, vakyam
rasatmakam kavyam (« Art is expression informed by Ideal
Beauty », according to AKC) constitutes, in essence, the basic Indian
aesthetic formula, and the tasting of this « Ideal Beauty » or rasa becomes the subject of commentaries
and discussions, elaborated by such mediaeval and modern aestheticians as
Viswanatha, Danamjaya, Coomaraswamy and Goswamy. AKC compares and relates the
tasting of rasa, which to the
Hindu-Indian affords a vision of the Ultimate Reality, « twin brother to
the tasting of Brahma » and as such a way out of rebirth in the
transmigration of souls, to Christian Scholastic aesthetics and to such isolated
post-mediaeval visionary cases like the mystical Blake’s in order to affirm the
universality of its underlying nature to be experienced in all forms of art
everywhere, decrying at the same time the ephemeral nature of modern European
philosophy of art which, according to AKC, attaches greater value to sensations
and the surface physicality of expression in art.Other aesthetic theories such as dhvani do not concern us here though the Alankarika of the navina school recognized bhava (emotion) as the best theme for
poetry or what made for superior poetry. [RAMACHANDRAN 1980: 57ff] Right now,
without entering into any great detail on the theory of rasa which is beyond the scope of this paper, it will be useful to
take a couple of examples of AKC’s art interpretations to see if the rasa theory - since it is supposed to
underwrite the traditional Hindu conception of art - subsumes his artistic
outlook and aesthetic criterion. Let us first consider his approach at the
beginning of his role as an art critic and historian, at the time when he had
already published Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908), Indian Sculpture
and Painting (1908), The Indian Craftsman (1909) and the two volumes
of Indian Drawings (1910-12). The work we shall draw from is the Selected
Examples of Indian Art (1910) that AKC printed on his own Essex House Press
at Broad Campden.

His overall approach in interpreting these plates is based on a
description technique which, as I see it, falls under four separate headings.

1)Synopsis of the « legendary » background: Take for instance Plate I [no pagination for plates] entitled:
« Siva Ratri or Siva Puja ». Of this he says, « Siva’s Night is
a fast day falling on the fourteenth day of Maga (February). For twenty-four
hours the Saivite should abstain from food, drink and sleep. Puja (offerings of
flowers, fruit and water) is offered to Siva every three hours of the day and
night. »

2) Physical or surface description of the plate: « The
picture represents a Princess with two attendants making offerings at a
mountain shrine at night. The linga,
Siva’s symbol, is seen on the right at the mouth of a little cave within which
a light is burning. On to the linga falls
a splashing stream of water from the rock, to form a rivulet that finally passes
across the front of the picture, where its bank is lined with flowers and
nodding sedges. This stream is the Ganges, that falls from heaven on to Siva’s
head, and thence to earth. » [It is curious, AKC does not elaborate on
this prodigious myth that had once been wrongly construed as forming
« Arjuna’s Penance » in the Pallava Shore Temple at Mamallapuram,
early 8th. C.]

3) Interpretation (accompanied by further physical details):
« Perhaps there is a further meaning in the picture. Just as the yogi in
some Indian pictures stands for Siva himself, so here, the Princess adoring
Siva may be Uma. There is a conscious air about the mountain and the forest.
Uma is daughter of the mountain, she is Parvati. [Suddenly another key detail
of the picture emerges.] The half-hidden moon, even though full, suggests the
crescent moon on Siva’s brow; perhaps this reveals to us more than any other
detail the picture’s mysterious charm - the whole landscape is the living
garment of Siva himself. The linga is
only a symbol, but He is everywhere. »

4) Art-historical background: « The date of the work is
probably late seventeenth century. Its subject is purely Hindu, and I have
therefore classed it as Rajput: it belongs really to that fully developed
Indian style which owes much to both Rajput and Mughal sources. »

AKC has not in fact described the entire picture - not that this is
necessary in art criticism or in rasa
treatment. Besides, he has not paid any attention to the colours, though his
rather pregnant statement about the Princess being the daughter, Uma, of the
« conscious air » mountain must necessarily emanate from the sombre,
earthy colours of both the mountain and the forest. He has not even slightly
touched on the figures and the aspects of the three humans in the picture:
there are three women and yet he « presumes » - rightly I should
think - that one is a Princess who is seated upright. The other two are
therefore attendants; they are less accoutred, less finery on their seated
squat bodies which are covered all over, excepting the face and hands. AKC does
not describe the postures of the three, which, seems to me, to be very
important - together with the jewellery and clothing - in detecting the social
position of the figures. The attendants, holding vials or vessels in both hands
adopt a humble and almost disinterested expression and lackadaisical posture.
The Princess, by contrast, sits up boldly on her hind legs and has her hands
joined in prayer in front of her. She is also abundantly covered in jewellery
while her clothes are finer - a gossamer touch to them in contradistinction to
the coarseness and drabness of the green and mauve of the attendants’s
clothing; the Princess’s sparse clothing is in purple, golden and pink, with a
studded black satin headgear. Her face and head are full and resplendant while
her almost exposed torso is turgidly vibrant and rosy in colour - la belle fille en fleur! Not so the
attendants: one is between being dark and dusky, the other is of a clearer but
pale tincture. AKC also leaves out the description of the rocks, sedge and
plants surrounding the seated supplicatory figures, nor the trees on to the
left background and the starry yet cloudy sky between the mountain and the
woods. The tray with containers in front of the Princess and the sacrificial
fare are also left out. The frame of three-tiered filigree in gold over green
and blue does not attract his attention, either.

Here, we would do well to pause and listen to what AKC, himself, has to
say about the method of explaining works of art.

No explanation of a work of art can be called
complete which does not

account for its composition or constitution, which
we may call its ‘constant’

as distinguished from its ‘variable’.In other words,
no ‘art history’ can

be considered complete which merely regards the
decorative usage and

values as a motif, and ignores the raison d’être of its component parts,

and the logic of their relationship in the
composition. It is begging the

question to attribute the precise and minute
particulars of a traditional

iconography merely to the operation of an ‘aesthetic
instinct’; we have

still to explain why the formal cause has been
imagined as it was, and

for this we cannot supply the answer until we have
understood the final

cause in response to which the formal image arose in
a given mentality.

[COOMARASWAMY,
JCP 1990/1991: 24]

AKC’s explanation of Plate I does, indeed, accomplish some of the stages
in the methodology he proposes (which is ironically structuralist in approach),
but certainly falls far short of the revelation of the « final
cause ». We can also see that there is a great deal he has left out. He is
not obliged to describe the entire picture, but since he does begin to do so, I
wonder then why he left out some rather important details, in particular the
colour scheme. The question that I am moved to ask in all AKC’s description and
interpretation - the major part of it has to do with extra-artistic or pictural
concerns - is to what extent the theory of rasa
has entered into his interpretation or « criticism »? You might
think that this is after all only one picture, and, therefore, such a question
is invalid if we take his entire art-historical work into consideration.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. As we have seen, this picture is part of
the Rajput collection AKC discovered and presented to the world from probable
oblivion. It also appears in a selected collection. Besides, the technique I
have recorded is what he has adopted for almost all the remaining plates in the
collection. The question is also: under what rasa/sthayibhava may we class the picture? What then are the
considerations and criterion which informed AKC’s selection of this picture? If
I am to answer this question myself, I’d say something like this: the theme of
the picture is religious fervour as portrayed in sacrifice, in other words, joy
in pain (let none cry « masochism »!), selected for the fineness of
three presences in other-worldly wilderness, if need be, an air of mystic
entrancement conveyed mainly by the gloomy colours of the surrounding
ruggedness of Nature threatening to overwhelm the three innocent, lonely and
helpless, feminine presences; so what is its rasa? Blind faith? Bhakti?
Santi? Quite frankly, I don’t see how
Indian aesthetic theory comes into play in AKC’s interpretation of this
picture. Let us also admit it, the background details AKC has supplied is not
something the « uninitiated » receptor can find for himself, but this
comes from research and scholarship, not from an aesthetic response to the
object of art before one. For instance, for the background information on
Rajput painting, AKC had to rely on Keshava Dasa’s Rasikapriya.

Let us now look at a « modern » painting AKC has selected for
this collection. This is Plate XIII, entitled: « The Banished
Yaksha » by Abanindronath Tagore, the Nobel Prize winner’s nephew, and
leader of the national school of modern painting in India before the Second
World War. This is what AKC has to say about it.

The Yaksha for some offence was banished for a year
from Aloka, the

city of Kuvera, and seeing one day a drifting cloud,
he addressed to it a

message for his far-off wife. This has been made by
Kalidasa the occasion

for a long and beautiful poem, « The Cloud
Messenger », describing the

journey of the cloud all over India, until it reaches
Aloka. Seated on a

slope of the Himalayas, the Yaksha, clearly of royal
blood, with a vina

by his side, is addressing the drifting mists, and
casting flowers towards

them in token of prayer. The actual effect of these
drifting mists, half hiding

trees and flowers, lending
a peculiar mystery to the whole landscape, is

rendered with great sympathy and skill. The
reproduction loses much,

however, without colour. The colouring of the original
picture is extra-

ordinarily beautiful.

My comments on Plate I apply equally to Plate XIII; he admits the
importance of seeing the colour in the latter which he describes quite flatly
as « extraordinarily beautiful ». Apart from the extra-artistic
background details or « pre-dramatic event » of the painting, AKC has
really nothing very much to say about it. So, what are we to conclude again? Is
rasa a theory that
« cannot » be applied to certain works of art, even if they are
Indian and traditional? Or is it that these plates AKC selected from a whole
range of Indian paintings simply do not qualify as being worthy of a rasa response? In other words, according
to traditional Indian classical theory, these plates do not come up to mark as
works of art. It would do no good to assume that so fine and learned a person
as AKC was not « sa-hrdaya »
as the creators of the paintings.

We cannot leave our examination of AKC’s aesthetic responses to Indian
art without comparing the above interpretative technique with that of another
period in history studied at a time in his life when he had acquired greater
skill and expertise. In 1927, AKC published his History of Indian and
Indonesian Art, a book which had finally established his reputation as one
of the foremost art-historians on South and Southeast Asia - together with
J.Burgess, Vincent Smith, E.B. Havell, A.Foucher, A.Grünwedel, W.Simpson,
J.Ph.Vogel, J.H.Marshall, Roger Fry, O.C.Gangoly, R.P.Chanda and a few others -
if not the foremost art-historian of the times. Even as late as 1976, Roy
C.Craven writes: « Though the book is now somewhat outdated, anyone
involved with the art of India owes a fundamental debt to Coomaraswamy and must
ultimately come to regard him as their scholarly patriarch. » [1976: 7]
Let us also select a period in Indian art which stands out by its overwhelming
and distinctive productiveness - the Gupta period, 320-600 A.D. AKC himself
says that the

outstanding characteristic of the art of India at this time is its

classical quality. [...] With a new beauty of definition it
establishes the

classical phase of Indian art, at once serene and energetic, spiritual
and

voluptuous. The formulae of Indian taste are now definitely crystallised

and universally accepted; iconographic types, and compositions, still

variable in the Kusana period, are now standardised in forms whose

influence extended far beyond the Ganges valley,][ and of which the

influence was felt, not only throughout India and Ceylon, but far beyond

the confines of India proper, surviving to the present day.

[COOMARASWAMY 1927/1965: 71-72]

In considering the relevance of rasa
theory to Indian art that AKC discusses in this book, this period should be
particularly interesting for its classicism and therefore for its rasa-oriented art. A revision of his
comments on this period reveal once again his enormous scholarship and
comparative technique in the arts in general, his acute sense of history and
his ability to collate all the variegated elements into a plausible synthetic
whole. But once again, we are left in the lurch about figuring out how the
theory of rasa entered into an
appreciation of the outstanding artistic qualities of the period. The book
contains the now famous tour de force of
400 selected plates of Indian art, crafts and architecture, with a description
of the plates given separately. The description unfortunately remains what it
is, a sparse and basic description of bare essentials: mainly place, period,
material used, or where found. In the 213 pages of text, we are regaled to a
highly documented history of art in South and Southeast Asia, but if we look
for the way classical Hindu theory shaped this phenomenal art, we are refered
to some authority of the past on the subject, as for instance:

The Visnudharmottaram
distinguishes the kinds of painting appropriate

to temples, palaces and private houses; and applies
the theory of rasa to

painting. Paintings are there classified as satya, vainika, nagara and misra,

which I am inclined to render as true, lyrical,
secular and mixed, mainly

with reference to their themes. [In a footnote he
says: Satya seems to mean

Discoursing on Gupta art, AKC compares and contrasts the Kusana period,
the Ghandara and Mathura schools, analyses with great precision the place of
painting, sculpture, religious public architecture, such as, stupas [funeral mounds], caitya-halls [halls of group worship or
memorial monuments], viharas [monasteries],
sikhara shrines [the tower over the
principal sanctuary of the hindu temple, known as vimana in the South], and other domestic and palace architecture,
and arts and crafts, etc., defines their styles and influences, enters into,
for instance, the polemic over the influences of Hellenistic art on Ghandara
art with gusto, quoting as he often does, his contemporaries before taking a
definitive stance.

Thus the famous theory of the Greek origin of the
Buddha image,

propounded by Foucher, and since adopted by many
scholars, proves

[sic]to lack all solid foundation, and falls to the
ground, and with it the

implied Greek inspiration of other Indian images,
Brahmanical and

Jaina. The fact that a Hellenistic element, plastic
and iconographic,

of some kind, enters into and is absorbed by Indian
art, remains.

Opinions may differ as to its extent and significance;
its importance

is slight, and perhaps rather historical than
aesthetic.

[COOMARASWAMY 1927/1954: 75]

To establish the « Indian-ness » of the Buddha figure in the
early Gupta period, he has recourse to very deft descriptive touches:
« ...characterised by its refinement, by a clear delineation and
definition of features, by curly hair, absence of urna [the « Third Eye »], greater variety of mudras,
elaborately decorated nimbus, the robe covering one or both shoulders and
extremely diaphanous... » [ 1927/1965: 74], but then his critical approach
is still descriptive. It is when he deals with architecture that he moves away
from the apparently descriptive approach to stylistic and structural nuances,
waxing philosophic at the same time.

The change from horizontal and domed to vertical and pointed forms

is the most conspicuous tendency represented in Indian architecture, and

must reflect an emotional qualification taking place in religious psychology

not unlike that which distinguishes Gothic from Romanesque. A parallel

tendency in India in narrative art has been traced by Foucher,
contrasting

the reserve of the earlier Jataka
scenes with the emotional emphasis

already so marked at Ajanta. The same development can be followed in

the literature, and no doubt, if we knew enough about it, could be

recognized in music and dancing.

[COOMARASWAMY 1927/1965:
83]

AKC concludes the Gupta period by his consideration of paintings mainly
from the Ajanta viharas, and he
quotes Lady Herringham and Dey to underline its simplicity and religious fervour,
not in any sense as

primitive or naive; a more conscious, or, indeed, more
sophisticated

art could scarcely be imagined. [...] The specifically religious element
is

no longer insistent, no longer antisocial; it is manifested in life, and
in an

art that reveals life not in a mode opposition to spirituality, but as
an

intricate ritual fitted to the consummation of every perfect experience.
[...]

The sorrow of transience no longer poisons life itself; life has become
an

art, in which mortality inheres only as karuna-rasa [pure compassion] in a

poem whose sthayi-bhava is srngara. The ultimate meaning of life is
not

forgotten,...but a culmination and a perfection have been attained in
which

the inner and outer life are indivisible; it is this psycho-physical
identity

that determines the universal quality of Gupta painting.

[COOMARASWAMY
1927/1965: 90-91]

It is undeniable that AKC here is treating of an entire period, and as
such we may not be able to validly work out his technique in consonance with
our earlier analyses of the selected plates of 1910, but then, judging by the
quotations of authorities he gives and his own methodology of relying heavily
on descriptive and historical phenomena, we are again at a loss to understand
how Indian classical theory, apart from, say, the canonical rules formulated by
Cukracarya in his Silpa Sastras - the canonical texts that painters and
sculptors strictly follow in their creations - feeds his appreciation of art in
general, excepting of course, for AKC, the religious substratum on which art
erects itself. « L’émotion esthétique naît de l’accord de l’âme avec
le mode permanent, donc par empathie
(sadharana) et re-création de
l’imagination. Elle est essentiellement le produit de l’activité spirituelle du
spectateur lui-même... ».5 [COOMARASWAMY 1977: 83] This is specially the
case when we come across his numerous essays explicating the relevance of rasa.

From this passage we can glean that, for AKC, « l’émotion
esthétique » is some sort of a consciously beatific, unifying mystic
experience, having no relevance to other qualities of the material of the work
of art, and yet he affirms that the rasa
is that which gives form to it. In a way, then, this passage may excuse his
descriptive technique in interpretation: « non à l’information qu’on en
peut retirer ». Even if we accept this version of rasa theory, when it comes to AKC’s critical response, we are time
and again confronted by the host of extra-artistic details which constitute
« l’information qu’on en peut retirer » through a study of the work
of art’s non-artistic background, such as, « pre-dramatic events »,
legendary or religious allusions, and historical associations. And since he
says the rasa « se manifeste
spontanément », it would have been by far a greater contribution to art,
if AKC had deemed it worthy of recording his own spontaneous emotional
responses to the works of art that he had gazed upon for the better part of his
life.

On
Coomaraswamy’s Assessment of Rajput

and Mughal Painting

In
fact, there is little use now in belabouring the case of AKC’s rather
ambiguously tortuous espousal of Indian classical theory in his own
interpretations of Hindu art. By checking on his pronouncements on all sorts of
works of art, one can see that this is quite evident. This does not mean,
however, that AKC was inept as an interpretor of Indian art; on the contrary,
we have discussed his predilection for religious or spiritual justifications in
his aesthetic explanations of Indian art. It might appear that these are part
and parcel of one and the same thing; it is and yet it is not: paradoxically it
depends on how you look at it. Bharata’s rasa
theory, Sukracarya’s canonical rules of artistic creation, and the
additions and modifications of later aestheticians, like Vishwanatha in his Sahitya
Darpana, to the corpus of the Hindu canon of art - are not independant of
the Hindu religious outlook or Brahmanical weltanschauung.
AKC perhaps also pushed his conception of Indian art a bit beyond defence.
Although several other art historians, in particular, Vincent Smith and E.B.
Havell, had championed Indian art against attacks from John Ruskin and Lord
Birdwood, AKC made himself particularly known for his pioneering efforts in
discovering Rajput painting, and also for the attention he gave Mughal art, but
he was sadly proven wrong later for his assumptions based on their nature and
value.

AKC felt that Mughal art was secular, « worldly, topical, occupied
with the life and times of the court and with natural appearances »
[LIPSEY III 1977: 99], only an inconsequential « interlude » in
Indian art, lasting through Akbar and Shah Jahan’s reigns, whereas, he
postulated, Rajput painting followed ancient Hindu traditions, related to the
Ajanta frescoes of the 7th and 8th centuries.

Unlike Mughal painting, it [Rajput art] was little
concerned with the

precise imitation of natural appearances, either of
persons or of landscapes,

plants, and animals; all of these elements appear in
Rajput art, but

transformed by the mind’s eye into a harmonious
imagined world that

does not compete with nature. [...] Mughal art is
now understood to have

been the all-important catalyst that transformed the
tradition-bound

schools of Hindu painting that existed just prior to
the period of Akbar...

[LIPSEY III 1977:
100]

Lipsey’s comments further show that both Hermann Goetz and Eric
Schroeder attacked AKC’s findings on Rajput and Mughal art, and later
scholarship showed that the Ajanta frescoes had no connection to Rajput
painting. Schroeder also demonstrated that Mughal art was religiously inspired.
Goetz, on the other hand, attacked AKC’s view of Rajput civilization as being
« simple, aristocratic, generous and self-sufficient », for in fact
the common people had no access to their art.

The Buddhist aesthetic doctrine: samvega

In the essay, « Samvega:
aesthetic shock », it would seem by the comments AKC makes, he comes close
to identifying his own conceptions of artistic appreciation with those of classical Indian theory, in this case a
Buddhist doctrine, but then again it is rather difficult to separate the
explanations he gives of the theory and his own views. This sounds like a
paradox, and it might very well be true: in the clarifications he supplies of
the concept of samvega, one is almost
tempted to construe an « over-reading » of the principle he might
appear to espouse, but this is as far as one may go, unless one has proof of a
practice in AKC’s interpretations which remains consistent with the response in
relation to this theory;besides, one
cannot simply enter into AKC’s head and sort out, on the one hand, the theory
he is explaining and commenting on and, on the other, the specific AKC
response. In the final analysis, we have to fall back on his own avowal that
« ...what I have sought is to understand what has been said... ».
[LIPSEY II 1977: 434] The aesthetic concept ofthe Pali word samvega,
according to AKC, circumscribes

a state of shock, agitation, fear, awe, wonder, or delight induced
by

some physically or mentally poignant experience. [...] The shock is a

consequence of the aesthetic surfaces of phenomena that may be liked

or disliked as such. The complete experience transcends this condition

of ‘irritability’. [...] ...more than a merely physical shock is
involved; the

blow has a meaning for us, and
the realization of that meaning, in which

nothing of the physical sensation survives, is still a part of the
shock. These

two phases of the shock are, indeed, normally felt together as parts of
an

instant experience; but they can be logically distinguished...[...] In
the first

phase, there is really a disturbance, in the second there is the
experience

of a peace that cannot be described as an emotion in the sense that fear

and love or hate are emotions.

[LIPSEY I 1977: 182-184]

It is for the above reason as well that AKC is averse to considering santi (peace) as a rasa: Bharata himself did not list santi among the eight he prescribed. As an example of samvega, AKC cites the anecdote of
Brother Vakkali who spent his days gazing at the « beauty » of the
Buddha’s person. Vakkali overcomes being snared by the
« idolatrous experience » in that he does not become
« attached » to the visual image: thus he makes the transition from
shock to delight, and from delight to understanding. AKC stresses that
« the aesthetic support of contemplation is not an end in itself. »
[LIPSEY I 1977: 181] Here again, we may note the religious motive in aesthetics
that, time and again, occupies AKC’s interests. The principle of art for art’s
sake must, indeed, appear to him to be quite pointless. This very same attitude
can be observed in his commentary of a well-known modern painting.

We also feel the horror; but do we
see the barb when we consider

Picasso’s Guernica,
or have we ‘desired peace, but not the things

that make for peace’? For the most part, our
‘aesthetic ’ approach

stands between us and the content of the work of art,
of which only

the surface interests us.’

[LIPSEY I 1977: 179]

Conclusion

What are we then to make of AKC’s aesthetics, if he does not rely
totally on Indian-Hindu tradition in his interpretations of art? The truth is
most - if not all - art historians of the region’s art do not demonstrate a
thorough or more scientific approach. As we pointed out earlier on, it is more
or less in his asides - not in his major essays and books - that we may note a
more personal view. In 1919, AKC wrote the following notes for John
Mowbray-Clarke’s exhibition catalogue in New York.

The two things that matter least
about a work of art are its charm and

its technique. What does matter is its necessity,
and the quality springing

from necessity which we appreciate in works of art
that are truly original

- that of immediacy. The only title to ideas is our
ability to entertain them.

Works that are original possess a life of their own
aside from any question

of « difference »: and many a work that is
traditional, influenced or

plagiarized, is more original than another that is
conspicuously novel. It

is romantic to believe the first kiss to be better
than the last, or to discover

spiritual value in a merely technical virginity. It
is only love and not the

sequence of gestures that constitutes the truth of
experience.

[LIPSEY III 1977: 150]

We would not be far wrong in assuming here that AKC was attacking all
that was avant garde and went under
the name of « modern » which he, quite obviously, saw as a vain
attempt to be original through experimentation in technique. In its place, he
wanted the perpetuation of the old norm, even the imitation of traditional
masters, and what he preferred most was spontaneity, in other words,
« innocence », freshness, arising from the purity of the spirit
within, within all. In this he was being faithful to his version of the Hindu
spiritual tradition. He saw abstract art « as an ascetic, idealistic
reaction to the ‘art of luxury’ whose purity was « not true to the
earth. » [LIPSEY III 1977: 150]So
much so that it is curious to see him taking a stance on the « art of
photography » and propounding « other » aesthetic norms. He
championed the work of Alfred Stieglitz, even finding for it a place in the
Boston Museum, for he felt that the German-trained photographer

had thought through to a way of linking
photography with the philosophical

basis of all the arts that he called
traditional. [...] The peculiar virtue of

photography [...] is its power of
revealing all textures and revealing all details.

The art of photography is to be sought
precisely at this point: it lies in using

this technical perfection in such a way
that every element shall hold its place

and every detail contribute to the
expression of the theme. Just as in other arts

there is no room here for the
non-essential. [...] ...the problem is so to render

every element that it becomes essential;
...

[LIPSEY III 1977: 158]

Here, in this statement, we
might note an element of rasa theory
creeping into his critical makeup: the essential
as opposed to the non-essential, the
permanency of sthayibhava as opposed
to the transient mood of vyabhicaribhava,
but then the latter also has its place in the Indian aesthetical operation of
the communication of art. So much so that it is quite surprising to see AKC as
adamant as he was about modern art as late as 1928 in a conversation with
Dorothy Norman over Stieglitz.

I asked
Coomaraswamy which modern artists in America he admired.

He replied, « Not any. And no Europeans
either. The very term modern

art is an absurdity. The notion that one should attempt to be original
in

art is sheer
nonsense. »

« Stieglitz’s photographs, » said
Coomaraswamy, « are in the great

tradition. In his work, precisely the right
values are stressed. Symbols

are used correctly. His photographs are
‘absolute’ art, in the same sense

that Bach’s music is ‘absolute’ music. He is the
one artist in America

whose work truly matters. »

[LIPSEY III 1977: 159]

Declarations such as these in aesthetics must indeed appear to be
arbitrary and dogmatic, but here we are dealing with a man who had already by
that time catalogued, interpreted and written out the history of South and
Southeast Asian art. Right at the time when AKC was turning to art and
aesthetics, it is interesting to note that Wassily Kandinsky went through his
apocalyptic experience as a painter in 1908: he was

experimenting with colours and forms to express what he called ‘an inner

necessity’. [...] ...that in order to be expressive of such inner
necessity it was

not necessary to be representational.[...] He realized that a work of
art must

always be expressive -
expressive, that is to say, of some profound emotion

or spiritual experience. Could form and colour, free from all
representational

aim, be articulated into a language of symbolic discourse?

[READ
1959/1964: 188-191]

Oddly enough, this sounds very much like what AKC has been saying all
along about Hindu art, especially the Kandinsky definition of a work of art in Der Sturm in 1913, with the difference that Kandinsky chose to affect both
aesthetic and spiritual reaction in the receptor by the process of organizing
form and colour: « the form of the work of art is in itself the content,
and whatever expressiveness there is in the work of art originates with the
form. »[READ 1959/1964: 195]

What can we then make of AKC’s aesthetic approach to art? If an answer
were at all necessary at this stage of the discussion, we might simply say that
here was a man - not quite intolerant as his words might make him out to be -
who believed that art was subservient to the religious purpose in man, that art
should manifest and reveal to man the « Eternal Spirit » in all
of us, but then, of course, you would have to subscribe to the ultimate reality
of this faith in art as well as in the directions the Hindus wished humanity
should take to be able to fully appreciate AKC’s contribution to the world of
(Indian) art. It is difficult to think of a better epitaph to Ananda Kentish
Coomaraswamy than the following words by his perspicacious biographer, Roger
Lipsey.

Coomaraswamy [...] was essentially a scholar and
a man of letters.

His truth came in part from a powerful conscience
whose seeds were

sown by William Morris, but even more, in his
later years, from

po[u]ring over the religious writings of the
world and recognizing, step

by step, that his own nature and hence all men’s
natures were constituted

along the lines that the texts affirmed.

[LIPSEY III 1977: 159]

And if I might be allowed to add my own last word, I would say, in the
sense of the spirit of hexagram 15 of the Yi
Jing, the greatest quality AKC has demonstrated by his lifelong dedication
to the study and exposition of Oriental and European arts and theology is the
unequivocal sense of modesty and humility, as witnessed by his most humbling
admissions in his « Seventieth Birthday Address »: the image is one
of the mountain hidden in the earth!

List of References

COOMARASWAMY, ANANDAK. 1908. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art.Broad Campden,

England: Essex House Press.

_________________. 1913. The Arts and
Crafts of India and Ceylon. London & Edinburgh:

T.N.Foulis.

_________________. 1916. Rajput
Paintings, being an account of Rajasthan and

the Punjab Himalayas from the XVIth. to the XIXth. century. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

T.Wignesan
is a Research (and teaching) Fellow with the French National Centre for
Scientific Research (Centre National de
la Recherche Scientifique), and he is, at the moment, attached to the
School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Paris, France.

1
I gave this paper at the « 5th Sri Lanka Conference », held at the
University of New Hampshire, 10-13 August 1995.

2
According to Dr.Rama P.Coomaraswamy, the only surviving son of Ananda
K.Coomaraswamy, whom I met on 15 August1995, the British authorities, in 1917, had confiscated his father’s
house at Broad Campden, proscribed AKC from entering the territory of the
British Empire and had placed a prize of £3000 on his head. Invited to give a
talk in Canada in his last days, he had had to decline on hearing that bounty
hunters had dispersed in the area in expectation of his visit. AKC, from the
moment Congress had enacted to grant him American citizenship, therefore never
laid foot on British sovereign territory after 1917. Dr. Denman W. Ross, patron
of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, purchased AKC’s unique Indian art collection
and persuaded the Museum trustees to employ AKC to catalogue it as the curator
of the Indian section.

3The
oriental artist who takes from Nature the elements of his composition, the
Chinese who paints mountains and fogs, the Indian who represents [in his
paintings, etc.] cowherds and milkmaids, are [actually] drawing the symbols of
general ideas, the exterior forms of an internal universal life.

4 -by
[the concept of] rasa it is possible
to describe a state of profound bliss, in the sense of ananda, a sort of beatitude that one can only experience through
the spirit. For writers like Vishwanatha, author of a celebrated treatise on
poetry of the XIVth century, the Sahitya Darpana, rasa is a condition which is close to the beatitude produced by the
knowledge [experience] of Ultimate Reality, « twin brother of the taste of
Brahma ». For Vishwanatha, the very definition of poetry implies the idea
of the word rasa. As they say so
often: « the soul of a poetical text is the rasa ».

5The
aesthetic emotion is born of the accord of the soul with the permanent mood,
and therefore by empathy (sadharana)
and recreation of the imagination.

6A
work of art is an affirmation to which the rasa
has given form; in the final analysis, its value is measured by the
delights of the aesthetic emotion and not by the information that one can get
out of it. One savours the rasa through
a consciously beatific, unifying mystic experience, but it is not brought about
by a specific pleasure, by a particular quality of the work of art or by an
agregate of delectable qualities: it manifests itself spontaneously, and it is
altogether independent of other mental activities, such as association or
curiosity.